Lanzhou

Lanzhou or Lanchow (both: länˈjōˈ) [key], city (1994 est. pop. 1,295,600), capital of Gansu prov., W China, on the Huang He (Yellow River) at its confluence with the Wei. It is a rail, highway, and air hub and the junction point to remote Xinjiang in extreme NW China. Lanzhou is linked by rail to Beijing and to the Republic of Mongolia and Russia. It is on the highway to Tibet. A rapidly growing industrial city, it receives its power from a nearby hydroelectric facility and from the coal that is mined in the area. It has one of the largest oil refineries in the country, in addition to textile mills, petrochemical, rubber, and fertilizer plants, and machine manufactures. It has a gas-diffusion plant for processing plutonium, and is the center of China's atomic energy industry. An old walled city, Lanzhou was the scene (1936) of a successful Chinese Communist revolt. It is the seat of an oil research institute, Lanzhou Univ., and numerous technical colleges. The name sometimes appears as Lan-chou.